Surely it would have conduced--especially in the painful excitement of the public mind on the subject at the time--to the satisfactory administration of justice, if it had been allowed Sir William Follett--without his being placed in the insidious position of appearing to press unduly against a prisoner being tried for his life--to combine and contrast these various circumstances, as he, of almost all men, could have best combined and contrasted them. The jury should have had their minds solemnly and authoritatively directed to the question, for instance, whether this last observation of M'Naughten made to Dr Munro was a spontaneous, genuine indication of utterly subverted mental faculties, continuing from the moment of his shooting Mr Drummond; or an effort of anxious astuteness to give effect to the suggestion which he may have believed would save his life. And, moreover, this and other circumstances should have been accompanied by a direction to the jury, in accordance with that of Lord Denman in Oxford's case,[37] and with the following canon, subsequently laid down by the Judges in their answer to the first question proposed by the Lord Chancellor[38]--viz., "That notwithstanding the party did the act with a view, under insane delusion, of _redressing_ or _revenging some supposed grievance or injury_, he is nevertheless punishable, if he knew at the time that he was acting contrary to the law of the land." Could M'Naughten be again tried on this charge, this is the precise question which would be left to the jury. Mr Alison, in his _Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland_,[39] thus lays down the rule applicable to such cases, in commenting on that of Bellingham:-- "Unquestionably, the mere fancying a series of injuries to have been received will not serve as an excuse for murder--for this plain reason, that, supposing it true that such injuries had been received, they would have furnished no excuse for the shedding of blood. On the other hand, however, such an illusion as depriving the pannel of the sense that _what he did was wrong_ amounts to legal insanity, though he was perfectly aware that murder in general was a crime."